


By Sun and Candlelight

by englishable



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-14
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-04-04 07:34:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4129822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s an old expression his mother used to say, something about “carrying a torch.” Decades later, Bruce finds it oddly appropriate for the situation at hand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By Sun and Candlelight

**Author's Note:**

> This is in response to a request on Tumblr, from a user who asked for Bruce/Natasha and something related to the word “mamihlapinatapei.” It’s Yaghan, a language spoken in Tierra del Fuego; the word translates to, roughly, “the look between two people, wherein each wishes that the other would share or give something they both desire but are unwilling or unready to offer it themselves.” Definitely a good choice for this couple.

…

It’s the hair, he decides.

It’s incongruous, that furious shade of red. It stands out like a beacon: which isn’t the sort of thing a person like her – a person like the one she used to be, a person like the one she was made into – is ever supposed to do.

But she never hides it under hats or scarves. She never seems to dye it, at least not to the best of his knowledge. She always walks with her back straight, head held ceremoniously high and level, as though she is carrying a lighted torch.

And she is, really. Considering the hair.

(That was an old adage of his mother’s, Bruce recalls.  _“Carrying a torch.”_  She’d explained it meant having feelings for someone, feelings you needed to keep secret because you knew they weren’t returned, although she hadn’t been able to tell him where said torch was being carried  _to_  – a festival, a funeral pyre, the castle of a monster misattributed by tradition with the name of his creator?

Haha, good joke. Everybody laugh.)

The hair burns beneath her parka’s white hood as she crouches next to him on the snow, her breath freezing in the cold, jewel-hard air and a high-powered rifle tucked against one shoulder. 

_(“Oh, derr`mo… Doctor Banner, what’s the arc-minute conversion for an angle of three point oh-four degrees? I need to zero the line of sight on this thing again.”_ )

Its curls catch and hold onto dust, to ash, to granules of glass that scatter when she shakes them out. 

_(“Riddle me this, Banner. If you were building a weapons depot for an international military terrorist organization, wouldn't shatterproof windows strike you as a smart investment?”)_

Its color shouts from the frame in which a certain newspaper clipping is contained, one displayed in the atrium of Stark Tower – the one that had been taken of them in front of what was left of Grand Central Station, following the Battle of New York. 

_(“Come on now, Bruce. Smile. History is written by the victors, right? Never too early to start the process.”)_

It remains one of the only things he can remember after each transformation, even in the blank exhaustion that immediately follows - except the image seems abstract, fragmented. It reconstructs itself from pieces which have been split along different neural pathways in his brain, synaptic lightning forking down the branches of a tree. 

But there it is, still, every single time: the memory of a shadow with dying-burning-rising sunlight in her hair. 

_(“Hey, Big Guy.”)_

And she reaches over, once, when they are seated side by side on a returning quinjet flight, and tugs a red hair from the woolen blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He has no idea how it could’ve come to be there.

Natasha holds the hair between her fingers. 

“You know, people always said this would get me killed some day. Pretty conspicuous, isn’t it?” 

Perhaps this is intended to be a rhetorical question, but she has likely had more than her life’s share of those already and so Bruce answers her anyway.

“Yes.” He pauses. “But it looks like you’ve proven them wrong so far.”

“I was – one of my handlers, she always told me we didn’t have a place in the world. People like me didn’t, she meant.” Natasha winds the strand of red hair around her smallest finger twice, three times. “She was right, technically. It’s easier to become somebody else if you’re nobody to begin with. But now I’m thinking that I saw the hair as  –”

She stops, abruptly, run up against a barrier. There is a fine-edged strain in the pursed line of her mouth, pinched between her brows. 

(Of course there is a strain, though. It’s always a strain, doing something you’ve never gotten much practice at.) 

Bruce realizes he’s been holding his breath. 

“…Evidence to the contrary?” he offers.

Natasha allows the strand of red to unravel, a loosening thread.  “I was going to say ‘a metaphorical middle finger,’ but yours might be slightly more genteel.”

“No, no, yours has a certain, uh, alliteration to it. It’s more poetic.”

“Maybe I could do that as a side-track career. Make up a pen name and publish poetry for _The Atlantic_? What do you think?”

“That’d be getting it backwards, wouldn’t it? Hero and operative by day, mild-mannered writer by night?”

“Well. I never said I’d be mild-mannered.” 

“True. That’s more of my department.” 

She smiles then, with her head at that level and lighted-torch angle. He cannot tell what she sees in his face, not that she necessarily ever sees anything at all. 

After three beats or so, he turns his eyes down. 

So does she. 

(And Bruce goes on carrying his own torch in the way he knows best, which is quietly and without expectation, and although it lets him see no further ahead than the next step beyond where he stands.

But this is the way she has lived all her life, so far – and therefore it is enough, Bruce decides, for him.)

…  
 _“I love thee to the level of every day’s  
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.  
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.  
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise._ _”_

_\- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Sonnet 43″_

…


End file.
